appendix on the Papal Physicians, I have brought
together some of the names and the achievements of astronomers who
worked at Rome or were in some way connected with the Popes. I know
that it is incomplete, but even as it stands it is a strong
confirmation of that principle so surprising to many presumably
well-informed people that the Popes were, as far as conditions
permitted, always the patrons, not the persecutors, of scientists in
all departments of the purely physical as well as biological,
theoretic and applied sciences.

It is sometimes assumed in the modern time, and it used to be the
custom a generation ago for nearly everyone in English-speaking
countries to assume, that because we knew very little about science in
the medieval period it must be because there was very little to know.
We have learned the fallacy of that supposition to our cost, by the
republication of the great text-books of medicine and surgery of the
medieval period and by the deeper study of such great scholars as
Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas. Even the scanty
records that we have show us the Popes following the same sort of
policy with regard to education and science as at the present time.
Men who collected scientific information for academic or popular
diffusion, as Isidore of Seville, Albertus Magnus, Thomas of Aquin,
were not infrequently raised to ecclesiastical dignities during life
and placed among the saints after death. Occasionally a distinguished
scientist like Gerbert, who became Pope Sylvester II, or Petrus
Hispanus the well-known physician, who became Pope John XXI, were even
made Popes. It is easy to understand that their attitude as Supreme
Pontiffs towards science would be not only not one of opposition but
of sympathy and helpful patronage.

While as I have said astronomy as a formal science practically did not
develop until the Renaissance, there were a series of important
discussions of the relations of the earth to the other heavenly bodies
and of the size and shape of the earth itself among the professors of
the medieval universities, and the perfect freedom with which these
discussions were carried on shows how unshackled {471} was human
thought. Albertus Magnus discussed the antipodes, dismissed the notion
that if there were men on the other side of the earth they would
surely fall off by the thoroughly Socratic remark that we ourselves
were on the other side from them yet did not fall off, a